Henry Kissinger Humble Uprising To Secretary Of State!
On May 27, 1923, in the Bavarian city of Furth, Germany, was born the man who would become known to history as Henry Kissinger. Heinz Alfred Kissinger, the eldest son of a rather well-off middle-class family, was his original name. His mother, Paola Stern, was a homemaker and the daughter of a prosperous farming and mercantile family, while his father, Louis Kissinger, taught nature in public schools.
Henry’s younger brother, Valta (Walter), was born two years after Henry. Their sons, Henry and Valta, profited from their parents’ cultural and intellectual pursuits. Their parents, Louis and Paola, were both highly educated. In the Kissinger home, there was a strong emphasis on appreciating high culture’s components, including philosophy, history, literature, and music.
For a middle-class family, the family had a rather good library, and Henry and Walter were encouraged to practice on the piano in the parlour to further their understanding of music. The literary and artistic pursuits of Kissinger’s ancestors are cited by several of his biographers as proof of their sense of German identity and nationalism.
But even though they had full civil rights as German Jews, they were frequently the focus of antisemitism in the 1920s and 1930s. Families like the Kissingers could, therefore, frequently not afford the risk of becoming publicly…
